This article describes how Charles Lovitt found a classroom activity in a resource book and by peering through a pedagogy lens, enhanced, tweaked, adapted, and extended the idea into a richer, healthier, well balanced classroom lesson. The task described in the article is often presented to students as a flash card for a limited time with the…

Using a game-based context and concentrating explicitly on language, students in the early years are able to make sense about place value amid the vagaries of the English language in naming numbers. This conceptual approach to understanding place value allows students to further develop number strategies beyond counting by ones.

There is a call for enabling students to use a range of efficient mental and written strategies when solving addition and subtraction problems. To do so, students should recognise numerical structures and be able to change a problem to an equivalent problem. The purpose of this article is to suggest an activity to facilitate such understanding in…

In this article, the authors describe their efforts to teach counting skills to their class of 5- to 7-year-olds at the Glenleighden School, located in a a suburb of Brisbane. As Glenleighden early childhood teachers, they work in collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team that supports children with speech and language difficulties.…

In the middle years of school, it is important that mathematics is challenging, engaging and focuses on worthwhile mathematics. In this article, Anne Roche describes a lesson that seemed to have all three of these characteristics, as students grappled with issues of scale to create a fun run, given a range of challenging mathematical constraints.…

Fluency with basic number facts is vital for students' progress in mathematics. Not only does it contribute to students' facility with mental computation and algorithms, but an understanding of numbers and their properties builds a foundation for future mathematical work including algebra. There are many activities that can help students…

As a result of conversations with students, previous teaching experiences, and through reading relevant literature, this author was aware that many students struggle with understanding fraction concepts. In particular, she knew that students had difficulty with reading, renaming, ordering, interpreting, and applying common fractions, fraction…

The authors discuss mass as one of the three fundamental measurements (the others being length and time), noting that estimation of mass is little taught and assessed in primary schools. This article briefly explores the reasons for this in terms of culture, practice, and the difficulty of assessing estimation of mass. An activity using the…